


I will never believe what they say, there is no strength in enduring

by unwindmyself



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Coda, Gen, Spoilers, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-02
Updated: 2018-05-21
Packaged: 2019-02-09 13:29:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12888894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unwindmyself/pseuds/unwindmyself
Summary: Jemma, musing on recent events.





	1. they never speak for themselves, we are disappearing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Post-5.02.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know. I was just really shook. It's late and fictional feelings explosions are happening. 
> 
> I'm me, so Jemma/Daisy and Bobbi/Jemma are implied, but for whatever reason she hasn't totally given up on Fitz yet, though those feelings are ambiguous in several ways. Also because I'm me, she thinks about her consensual kink habits, but very vaguely.
> 
> And there's a reference to the comics, too, just for fun.

The first thing she notices, without sound, is how alone she is.

That's always the way though, for her, isn't it? She was undercover alone, then she was in the lab alone, then she was in space - raw space - alone, then she wasn't alone but so much of the time she felt so anyway because try as they could none of the others understood exactly what she'd been through, then her, then Bobbi left and she knows why but it still aches, then her Daisy left, and at least she had Fitz back by then but did she, really, because once her Daisy returned everything else went into a robot apocalypse, just about, and then in the Framework she was left for dead until she found Daisy and then the others but she very much didn't have Fitz, not the way he said he wanted her or the way she thought she wanted him, and that absence was so pointedly bittersweet that it felt like hell, too, and now...

The second thing she notices is that her brain has no trouble filling the silence with even more words than usual.

She wants to scream, to tear this thing out of her head (she's not even sure she can without killing herself, but she's just lonely and scared enough to want to risk it), to rip the ribbon from her throat and wrap it around _his_ so tight he chokes to death. She wants to find every possible weapon she can and at least go down fighting. She wants to make them proud, her Daisy, her team, her Bobbi and the idea she still has of Fitz that she hopes is reality and her parents and siblings and whoever else matters if the others get back home and can tell their stories. She doesn't have any hope to tell her own anymore, that's the third realization, but she can at least be remembered well.

She can't do any of this, though.

It's clear that _he_ found her by accident, but he's keeping her for several reasons. One (lists being comforting when all she has is her own thoughts, not even a place to set them down) reason is her purported skills, but the second and third are her beauty (such as it is - she's half-tempted to flash him with the scar that bisects her back, that marred flesh, but it'd just get her killed quicker) and her fragility. More to the point, the two things together. She doesn't look like she'd resist, any more than she already tried and failed, and that makes her a nice doll to play with. The second she lashed out for true, she'd be nothing. Wasted. A vacancy. That's what they said, back in the world with sound.

If she was Daisy (or May, or Elena, or beautiful lost-to-her Bobbi) she'd be able to get out of this. She'd be able to destroy the monsters around her, or she wouldn't have even been trapped by them in the first place. She'd have fought back, not simpered and lied and tried to - what? Curry favor? Talk her way out of it? Useless. She's useless.

The fourth thing she realizes is that without sound your own words are, at least in this arrangement, meaningless.

The problem is that words are all Jemma has. She has her constant internal monologue, but before, she had knowledge (words to share, to help) and convictions (words to convince, to express). She doesn't have powers, or strength, or weapons at the ready. All she has is what's in her mind.

 _He_ doesn't care. _He_ doesn't want to give her resources to care, or act, either.

All _he_ wants is her compliance.

The first time she hears _his_ voice through the haze, she wants to throw up. It's a voice she's heard before, if not in timbre than in tone. It's everything she hates most, everything she tries to fight. It's the idealized supremacy of a lucky-born few, it's power and control and cruelty and shallowness beyond measure, it's Ward and Whitehall and Garrett and Radcliffe and Bakshi and even mostly-good men like Director Mace but when he was cold and Mack and Hunter but back when she was just Fitz's displeased stories to them and her father but when she told him the lie about becoming a corporate party planner and he laid into her for wasting her talents.

It's Fitz in the Framework shouting to get on her knees and that she was nothing to him.

It's Fitz the android telling her the Framework was important because it would make their lives, their chances, better as he tied her down so sloppily.

It's Fitz in real life treating her like she only deserved his time when she acted like he wanted.

It's the only sound she's heard in who knows how long (the fifth realization, without noise time is almost indecipherable to her) and she wants to jam the stupid thing in her ear so hard she doesn't ever have to hear it again.

She doesn't, though.

She was kept because she's not a fighter. Because perhaps somehow _he_ just knew that while she would gladly die in the service of her friends, she was - is - too frightened to put forth that same effort on her own behalf. Daisy has called her a survivor, but she knows she's just a coward. A stupid, stupid coward who's too weak to save herself and too naïve to stop secretly hoping that someone will come save her.

She can barely remember what it was like to not need rescued. That's one of the many things that scares her.

They must still be here, somewhere. Jemma refuses to believe otherwise. Daisy and May and Coulson and Elena and Mack, they can't be - they're all so strong, they'd never - and not for the first time since joining SHIELD she thinks that she won't make it out, but they might, and that's almost enough.

Or what if they won? What if they got her out, set this whole place free, saved the world and, and - what if she got to at least hear Daisy's voice one more time, that would be enough.

She's given parts of herself up before, in those pleasant and enjoyable ways, out of desire and trust and love and need. She's let herself kneel. Narrowed her focus down to one person, or two. But there's no joy in this, this having things taken. Now she feels the loss of them, her hearing and her smile and her liberty. There's no one can help her.

She knows this, surely as she knows she mustn't show emotion on her face or fall out of line or disobey _him_ or let herself be ruined. She knows this like she knows that all she is to these creatures is a pretty little toy (an android in her own right, but with limited programming; a brainwashed shell like poor Agent Palamas, a canvas to write on) and that she'll never see the sun again (or land, or the ocean she's still a bit afraid of, or the cottage she idealized as a girl, or or or). But whenever she follows the others down an impossibly pristine hallway her heart jumps at the thought that Daisy will be at the end of it ready to save her. Whenever she holds something metallic in her hands she imagines what it would be like to be brave enough to jam it in _his_ eye.

Every time she lays down to sleep she hears soft voices (Fitz rambling on about the latest _Who_ , Elena and Mack speaking quiet Spanish with each other and sounding like they're at home, Daisy all full of worry and bravado and compassion and love) and she prays, not to a god she doesn't really believe in but to her people's souls (surely Trip, if he lingered in the universe somehow, would protect them, surely Fitz, if he could reach them, had saved her before and could somehow do again, surely Daisy, if she had the intuition somehow, would know how much she was needed). She prays that she won't die surrounded by silence.


	2. you will be all that I seek in a twisted lie, I would live inside you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Right at the end of 5.10.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> #askmeaboutmyqueerjemmasimmonsagenda
> 
> #askmeaboutmysuspiciousofleofitzagenda

Jemma has a chance to think about it this time.

Before, the monoliths just _took_ her. No warning, or not enough warning, or she was just too frantic and overwhelmed to process it. She didn’t have the luxury (such as it is) of standing around knowing what’s about to happen and waiting. She didn’t have the luxury of planning.

Now is different. Now it’s a conscious return, a plan and not just an accident or being rescued like some sorry damsel. Now she can get her wits about her and really process what’s happened.

Too much.

She had all but abandoned hope, stuck in that silent world, and then Daisy had appeared and that had been horrible, of course, because she had been sold out by that disaster of a man-boy whose noble sacrifice is appreciated but still didn’t make her feel at all sad. But once she was there, Jemma could finally see her way out again. One way or another, the two of them could fight. (Or Daisy could fight and Jemma could plan and scream, mostly, but it would be something.) She just needed _him_ to set her in a room with Daisy alone, let her tend Daisy’s wounds or the like, and they could figure it out.

She never lost faith in Daisy, even when her faith in herself wavered and nearly disappeared, so she knows that the “Destroyer of Worlds” nonsense is a lie. She doesn’t know the truth yet, but she knows that isn’t it.

Then suddenly, Fitz appeared. She still doesn’t have every detail of how, because the promised gin-laced storytime hasn’t had time to happen and neither has storytime without gin. She hasn’t wanted to press or nag or waste time, but she still wishes that he would say more than he has or ask about her own trials. That’s petty and foolish, and she knows it, but she can’t help it slipping through. He showed up, though, and once again she wound up the damsel. Daisy fought, and Fitz fought, and May fought, and everyone fought, and mostly she just ran for it, but at least she had the nerve to attempt the Princess Leia move she’d been fantasizing about this whole time. She didn’t kill her slaver, but at least she wounded him, and it was almost enough.

She tried to be brave.

She tried to at least help save herself.

It shouldn’t be surprising that Fitz chose the absolute worst moment to propose. In theory it would have been sort of romantic if she hadn’t been temporarily deafened by a space tyrant, but in practice it was – she can hear Bobbi’s voice saying this, it’s such a Bobbi thing to say – a clusterfuck. He’s no doubt thought about it before (thinking about him thinking about it just reminds her of his sinister robot doppelganger though, which should be the first clue) but, well. His timing is awful because he’s a romantic, but mostly when things seem desperate. She didn't know he'd proposed when she did, and hers was pure impulse, a decision she's already regretting. (The second clue.)

It seemed sort of callous of him to bring his own failed proposal up while they were hauling Daisy, injured and exhausted, out of the room between them, but she’s not sure he was thinking about that so much as he was on an adrenaline rush or the like. She’s not anxious, exactly, just… aware.

And Daisy hasn’t said anything about it, then or since. Of course she’s been so busy, running around trying to atone for her past-future self’s fake sins and trying to help her present companions do right, she’s barely had time to talk to anyone about anything that wasn’t the mission at hand. Jemma is fairly sure that she’s slept the least of any of them (and that’s considering that she herself has managed to get all of six hours’ sleep, in short bursts mostly, since they retook the Zephyr) because she’s so concerned about everything and caught up in all of the horrible things people keep pinning on her.

But Jemma also doesn’t feel right about the fact that her idiot mouth proposed before she spoke to Daisy about it. He just said he didn't want to be apart from her and she panicked. She’s not sure what Fitz thinks marriage will do to change her relationship with Daisy, whether he’ll want things to change, and there hasn’t been the right moment to ask but also she’s been afraid to. She doesn’t want anything to change. (That’s definitely the third clue.)

Maybe part of the reason that Daisy’s been distant is that Daisy is afraid to bring it up too, but then Jemma knows better than that. Daisy has been distant because she’s afraid of herself, afraid of what she could hypothetically do, and if she were to say anything about it she’d say “go, marry him, be happy together and don’t worry about me.”

Jemma worries about Daisy (the fourth clue, but also a fact). She worries about attacks on Daisy’s good heart and the fact of how easy it is for Daisy to be convinced (by herself or others) that she’s the root of every problem. (It’s a tendency they share, admittedly, but it’s so much worse for Daisy because she’s so much more important and deals with things that are on a much grander, more terrible scale.) She worries about Daisy’s willingness to sacrifice herself (another tendency they share, but that’s _why_ she worries, because she understands).

She worries about what will happen if someone’s not there to stop her from going too far. This time it was Coulson and May, and Jemma had a split second where she could hardly breathe when he carried Daisy into the room like she was a child who’d fallen asleep on a long car ride. She knew without a doubt that Daisy had meant to rewrite the past-future by eliminating herself from the story. She’d have done it if Coulson hadn’t iced her. She’d have done it and Jemma knows it and all of her fears about never hearing Daisy’s voice again (or seeing her smile, or feeling her embrace, or) came rushing back.

She realizes that it’s harder for her to imagine Daisy not returning with them, with her, than it was to get used to the idea of Fitz not being in the future with them, with her. (The fifth clue.)

But even if not for Daisy, there are too many of those comparisons in her mind to make her want to run up to Fitz and remind him, “we're going to be married!” She felt genuine ecstasy helping the girl, the other slave-handmaiden whose name she’d never learned (she didn’t know any of their names and expects they didn’t know hers and she feels awful about it, but this girl she’d noticed more than once and been especially concerned for), pulling that accursed device out of her and seeing the joy on her face as her hearing returned (and she’d been in silence so much longer than Jemma herself, an unimaginable length of time) and she came that much back into herself.

She felt happier doing that, seeing her smile, receiving and returning her grateful hug, than she did kissing Fitz that first time back. That doesn’t seem right. Even if she takes into account how reasonable it is that she’d be so happy about releasing a sweet-seeming innocent girl from a torture she herself had known, even if she takes into account how reasonable it is that she’d be proud of herself for getting to do something concrete that helped, she knows she shouldn’t feel better about that than being reunited with her long-lost boyfriend. (She hates that word on Fitz, too, hates how diminishing it seems, how young, how incomplete. She always has. But anything grander, “paramour” or “beau” or “the love of [my] life,” those don’t feel like they fit either. Now it's “fiancé” and that seems off too.)

And she watched Mack and Elena reunite. They’d barely been apart an hour (although it was a horrible hour filled with every variant of murder) and the looks on their faces were the most adoring, most heartbreaking, most tender things she’d ever seen. She’d been right there, watching them realize the other was all right, watching them kiss (it felt private but she couldn’t look away), and she could hardly believe it was real. Even if she takes into account how emotionally trying their short separation had been, even if she takes into account how much more demonstrative they are naturally, she knows she shouldn’t look at them and think that maybe _that’s_ what true love between a man and woman looks like. (She should know what that looks like, shouldn’t she? She has her own true love. This shouldn’t be a surprise. But somehow it is.)

And she heard him call her “ _the_ fiancée” and her stomach flipped, but not in a butterflies and romance way. In a way that felt like panic: panic at being so easily categorized, so easily stripped of her individual identity, panic at the thought of forever.

She has some reevaluations to do when they get back, and she fears what will happen if she avoids them. _That’s_ the last thing she thinks as they get drawn into the monolith.


	3. I would live inside you, words will be all that I keep, in an open space they would live inside you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Post-5.14.

She feels as stunned as if she'd been hurtled through time and space even though she's not left the building in days.

The man she married - impulsively, against everything she ever figured she'd do, even if she loves, loved, him it wasn't like she had imagined at all - isn't there, or not entirely. She doesn't know anymore what's real and what's not, as he's concerned.

Well, no, that's not right. She knows one thing is real, the pain he could cause. Did cause. The bullet he had put in Mack. The hole he tore in Daisy's head even knowing what it could and would do to her.

Jemma has a strong stomach, she has to have in her line of work, but she nearly lost it watching him pull that thing out. It was longer, bloodier than she's visualized (of course it was) and Daisy kept screaming no, no, stop it, don't do that, and even if the Fitz they know, the one she's worked alongside for more than a decade, the one who's held her and saved her and loved her and loved the team as a whole and as individuals, if he still exists (ever really existed) he certainly wasn't there at that moment. There was just someone all dead in the eyes.

It's not quite the same look as when his Framework self shot poor Agnes point blank. That was a little crueler. It's not like when he nearly shot _her_ , that was furious. But there's something similar, a ruthlessness she never would have imagined.

(Is this why he always insisted that Ward couldn't be so evil? Did he recognize something he felt stirring in himself? She's got no way of being sure, but it does strike her that he was a thousand times more passionate about insisting Ward wasn't bad than insisting the same about himself.)

It's dumb luck that Daisy is all right. Jemma is thankful, of course, she's more relieved than anything ("I can't lose you too," she hears herself saying to Daisy months ago, after she faced down the robot with Fitz's face, she hears herself anguishing and ready to give up, and she feels the same way now) but she's still scared too. Not of Daisy, not of what she might do (the planet falling apart can't be her, Jemma holds that as fact even while everything else is in question), but of what could have been. Fitz and Daisy are her people: bad enough to watch one of them hurt the other, but to imagine them both gone? Herself without them?

It's too much.

She feels guilty. How could she not? Fitz only came on the Bus all those years ago because of her. Without that none of this would have happened. She doesn't regret saving Fitz in the ocean, because even if he's as awful as he seems to think (as he could be) she didn't know it then and the guilt would have eaten her alive, but she regrets bringing him here. Maybe he wouldn't have fallen to this in other circumstances, and he wouldn't have hurt any of these people if he didn't know them.

Although if what "the Doctor" says is true, maybe he would have after all.

The bloody Doctor. As if he was David Tennant. He'd hate being Ten, always found him overrated, but Four or Nine could never have come close to that deliberate darkness. That's one of the nastiest parts of this, Jemma thinks, though of course that's silly and childish.

She can't wrap her head around any of it. (Up to and including Deke's little bombshell, which feels like the wind getting knocked out of her. She doesn't want to believe it, but she sort of does and hates herself for it.) She can't reconcile this switch-flipped Fitz and the one she's known. And she thinks, bitterly, that this is her fault for not catching it sooner. That if she'd acted faster Mack wouldn't have been shot and Daisy wouldn't have been tortured and everything might be different. That she should have tried to talk to him about any of this before it became a catastrophe.

Daisy won't hold it against her, but she holds it against herself. She's too afraid to talk to Daisy yet. Afraid she'll fall to pieces when she's supposed to be the one making amends (the amends Fitz won't make himself, doesn't so much as hint at, doesn't believe are needed) and just make it worse. But she'll do it, she will, she has to.

She's afraid of what Daisy will say to her, too. About Fitz. That maybe their Fitz, her Fitz, is gone. She'd say it gently, probably, but she might say it, and maybe she'd be right.

But she's the only one who'd be able to say that and not look at Jemma like she's a fragment, like half of her is gone too. That's Jemma's other, more selfish fear: that the others will see only half of her with him gone or wrong or both. And: is a woman who can't see monsters a monster too?


	4. we hold up to an idea and we'll fight what we can't see

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Post-5.22.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ETA: Jem's feelings about Fitz are milder by far than mine but what are you going to do.

Jemma's not a superstitious woman by any means, and quite honestly she's never believed Fitz's talk about _the cosmos_ and she only sort of bought into the invincibility theory, she acted on it because it got things done and it helped her to feel brave but she didn't fully buy into it since if they were invincible there was no point in fighting to change the future, was there? But that doesn't stop her from thinking, before she thinks anything else, when she sees Mack walk in with that look on his face, she thinks -

 _This is why we weren't going to leave each other's sides_.

She understands that Fitz was trying to do the right thing, trying perhaps to prove to Mack that he wasn't a lost soul (Mack's opinion, Jemma knows, has always been important to Fitz, one of the most important opinions of all), trying to use his so-called invincibility for good. She understands why he did what he did. She understands that she didn't go because she was needed elsewhere, that they were necessary in different ways for once. She understands that what happens might have happened because the loop was already broken or might have happened because sometimes bad things just happen for no good reason at all and the loop has nothing to do with it.

She understands all of this.

She doesn't understand the world without him.

He'd made efforts to do better, since she and Elena broke him out for a second chance. Maybe she shouldn't even have done that, none of that mission went as planned and it's something of a miracle that they didn't both die at the hands of those Aryan disaster children (and honestly, especially after spending what little time she did with them, she didn't blame Elena for doing what she did). He'd made efforts, he'd tried. Maybe he hadn't done all he could do, he didn't apologize and he didn't try to make amends and maybe that was better because maybe he wouldn't have meant it, but he was trying. It was enough to believe that the Fitz she'd loved in one way or another for years and years was still there. That maybe if things were set, she wasn't completely out of luck.

(She'd run the possibilities in her head, or some of them. Being stuck married to a monster, if that's what won out in him, and all that that could have entailed. If she was, definitively, the mother of his child, she hoped that would mean he turned around, but it wasn't required and she had more than one nightmare about that, not that anyone knew.)

And, as sick as it sounds even just in her own head, a Fitz that was willing to die for others is a Fitz that she loved. One who'd put others before himself, offer himself up without a thought. Do the right thing. She had her doubts about the other side of him, doubted that he'd be willing to make that sacrifice, and it's not the sacrifice that she loved but the willingness, the unselfishness, the impulsiveness even. That's the man she knew.

That's the man she always sort of knew that she was going to lose.

She hasn't discussed this with anyone, really. She's not selfish enough to make Daisy listen to her talk about him, knowing that they still weren't exactly on speaking terms (for good reason, she'd never say otherwise) and knowing that she's feeling Coulson's absence even more keenly than the rest of the team (for good reason as well). She's not close enough with Piper to try to get into it, and double that with Davis. She knows Mack feels almost as much sadness as she does, but he has Elena to feel it with and she isn't going to interrupt that, it wouldn't be fair. She just packs his suitcase and writes a note to his mum and tries to push the aching sadness down. Isn't that why he'd been so angry at her, after their brush with death in the ocean? She'd pushed too much away. What she wouldn't give to have even that hellish time back, what she wouldn't give to be able to try and separate herself from this.

And she hasn't been able to say to anyone that she's angry as well as sad. At the way things happened, of course, at _the cosmos_ even, but also a little angry at him. Mack came to break the news and he told her that he was with Fitz till the end, reassuring and proud and soothing even, and he said that Fitz knew he'd done something good at the end, and all of that she's glad about. She's glad that he went as a hero. She's glad that he wasn't alone, and that if it wasn't her it was Mack.

But Mack didn't tell her that he'd said anything about her, or for him to tell her. He didn't even make anything up to comfort her (good, as she'd have been able to tell). Shock, she knows, can scramble the brain, make strange things be said or not said. But if he'd said something, anything, even mentioned her professionally ("Jemma's a doctor, she can fix my legs") or in passing, Mack would have told her. And for all that she's doubted their relationship (especially lately) she's still - was still - technically his wife, and more importantly than that she'd been his _person_ for more than a decade. She's sure it would have been different if she was _there_ , but it still hurts knowing he didn't have any last words for her, not even a simple "I'm sorry" or "I love you." He may have felt it, but he didn't say it, didn't leave it with Mack to pass along.

(She knows what Daisy will say about this, or at least knows how she'll say it. The phrase "piece of work" will probably be involved, and maybe she'll be at least a little bit right.)

Her vows, she knows now, were something of an exaggeration. He's not - he wasn't - _her life_. She's still here without him, she didn't curl on her side and wither away when he was gone. She didn't even feel it in her chest when he left, like they say sometimes you do in stories. She had him and then abruptly off of Mack's sympathetic expression she didn't. But where he was in her there's now just something empty, and she could fill it with grief or she could fill it with rage or she could fill it with anything else unproductive.

Or she could fill it with the family she still has. At least, she thinks, they're one of those more than ever, and nobody's really running this time (she's not and Daisy's not and that's really what she means, May will be back). That counts for a lot, even if it can't fix every last thing.


End file.
